The friends turned out of Trubnoy Square into Gratchevka, and soon
reached the side street which Vassilyev only knew by reputation. Seeing
two rows of houses with brightly lighted windows and wide-open doors,
and hearing gay strains of pianos and violins, sounds which floated
out from every door and mingled in a strange chaos, as though an unseen
orchestra were tuning up in the darkness above the roofs, Vassilyev was
surprised and said:

"What a lot of houses!"

"That's nothing," said the medical student. "In London there are ten
times as many. There are about a hundred thousand such women there."

The cabmen were sitting on their boxes as calmly and indifferently as
in any other side street; the same passers-by were walking along the
pavement as in other streets. No one was hurrying, no one was hiding his
face in his coat-collar, no one shook his head reproachfully.... And
in this indifference to the noisy chaos of pianos and violins, to the
bright windows and wide-open doors, there was a feeling of something
very open, insolent, reckless, and devil-may-care. Probably it was as
gay and noisy at the slave-markets in their day, and people's faces and
movements showed the same indifference.

"Let us begin from the beginning," said the artist.

The friends went into a narrow passage lighted by a lamp with a
reflector. When they opened the door a man in a black coat, with an
unshaven face like a flunkey's, and sleepy-looking eyes, got up lazily
from a yellow sofa in the hall. The place smelt like a laundry with an